Our old factories finding respect

Henry Ford's 1910 factory — a pioneering building designed by Albert Kahn, home of the first full automotive assembly line — is used as a storage building. Some days you can't see the plaque for the weeds.

That's how we often see Detroit factories: boarded up, unused. A century ago, Detroit was at the forefront of an industrial revolution that provided jobs, even as it influenced art and architecture around the world.

Can any vestige of that dramatic past be reclaimed? Today, there are glimmerings that Detroit's machine-age heritage is being re-harnessed to new purpose, with a 21st century imagination at work.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the newly installed exhibit "Vertical Urban Factory" seizes on the way factories — gritty, smokestacky, unglamorous — inspired 20th century ideas about space, light and openness that are still with us, and insists that factories still have an important role to play in the future of cities.

In its photographs of factory workers and illustrations of production and within its text, the show asks a question most of us wouldn't dare pose: How can we reinvent Detroit as a city whose factories aren't decrepit monuments to a dim past? How can even the old building be repurposed to a cleaner, more engaging industrial future?

Case in point: New York-based curator Nina Rappaport poses these questions inside MOCAD, a 90-year-old building that was once a car dealership and is now an art museum on Woodward Avenue at Garfield that flaunts its original concrete and ceramic tile floors.

The city was once a place where the aroma of Wonder Bread baking wafted over the freeways, and drivers on Woodward could watch Vernors bottles on an assembly line. "Factories can be part of our cities. By shutting them off from view, or moving them to the suburbs, we lose touch," Rappaport said during a recent interview at MOCAD.

Rappaport has an optimistic streak about places like Detroit, in part because she sees buildings around the world taking on new lives, in part because she's a scholar of factories, who recognizes their influential role.

Even as Rappaport, a university lecturer and critic, opened the Detroit show, a Texas-based company proved her point: Bedrock Manufacturing has leased space in the Midtown Argonaut Building. The company will make stylish $500-ish watches.

The Argonaut, now the Taubman Center and home to the College for Creative Studies, began its life as a General Motors laboratory and research center — designed by that omnipresent industrial architect, Albert Kahn.

In one extra twist, the Taubman fortune, wrought from building suburban shopping centers, renovated a chunk of Detroit's past — and now gives it a new lease on industrial life.